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                          'Silent Spring' Turns Fifty

   by Zulima Palacio

   WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote and published
   Silent Spring. Carson was ahead of her time. She said pesticides like
   DDT were damaging the environment and human health. Although the book
   became an inspiration for the environmental movement, the battle for
   the environment continues.
   In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was spraying more than
   a quarter-million kilograms of pesticides each year. Silent Spring, by
   Rachel Carson, revealed that pesticides like DDT were lethal not only
   for insects but for all living things.
   "Silent Spring essentially told the reading public that human beings
   could alter the natural world in ways that were quite deadly and that
   it could be potentially lethal to human beings as well as to other
   parts of the natural world," said Linda Lear, the author of a biography
   on Carson.
   More than six million copies of the book have been sold in the U.S.
   It's been translated into some 30 languages.
   In the Washington suburbs, the house where Carson wrote Silent Spring
   is now a National Historic Landmark.
   Carson was a pathbreaker.
   "In Silent Spring, she is writing in a voice that I call apocalyptic
   writing," added Linda Lear. "She is trying to sound an alarm to get our
   attention."

   Thirty years after Silent Spring was published, public television, in
   its program The American Experience, called the book one of the most
   important of our time.
   But there were dissenters. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize
   winner, led the defense of pesticides.
   "We're having troubles now feeding this hungry world," said Borlaug.
   "If you remove DDT with the hysteria that is present in the USA, the
   U.S. will be importing food, only there won't be any place from where
   to import it."
   By 1972, DDT was banned for agricultural use in the U.S. But thousands
   of new chemicals were being developed.
   For years, the U.S. Senate's Committee on the Environment has been
   trying to ban or control hundreds of chemicals from agricultural
   products and consumer goods.
   "This committee heard from CDC [Centers for Disease Control] officials
   who told us their scientists found 212 industrial chemicals, including
   six carcinogens, coursing through Americans' bodies," said Democratic
   Senator Frank Lautenberg.
   In 2006, the World Health Organization announced plans to use DDT again
   - indoors - in its campaign against malaria.
   Syngenta is a major producer of agricultural chemicals. Like others in
   the industry, it says its chemicals are safe if used properly.

   "We try to do every single study that is necessary to support the
   safety characteristics of the product." said Tim Pastoor, the company's
   principal scientist.
   Fifty years after Silent Spring, millions of kilograms of new
   pesticides and other chemicals are being sprayed across US farmlands.
   And the environmental movement is still fighting back.
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References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/silent-spring-turns-fifty-years-old/1501317.html